Re: Issue 1526 in lilypond: Building only English docs

[lilypond]

Comment #11 on issue 1526 by address@hidden: Building only  
English docs
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1526

"windows users running lilydev".  Yes, they have ubuntu, but they're still  
unfamiliar with the process.

I already know that
  make out=www build/Documentation/out-www/essay.pdf
works.  This has been discussed on the mailing list something like 3 times  
so far in 2011.  The problem is that this isn't a particularly easy, and  
certainly not intuitive, thing for a unix newbie to type.

Basically, I'm suggesting some extra syntactic sugar in the top-level  
GNUmakefile.in, which does something like:
quick-docs:
    for DOC in QUICKDOCS:
        make out=www Documentation/out-www/$(DOC).pdf
    endif

and then let people type
  make quick-docs=essay
or something like that.

- what's the easiest syntax that make allows us for a user to add variables  
to the command-line?  dunno.
- how can we access the names of manuals that the user asked?  dunno
- how can we write a for loop in make?  dunno
(I saw your last patches, I tested that they worked, the syntax looked ok,  
but I hate all build systems so I didn't bother memorizing the for-loop  
syntax you used)

I wouldn't be surprised if the whole "syntax sugar" patch took you 5  
minutes, once it was clear what we wanted here.  Of course, clarifying what  
exactly we want will probably take 10x the time it actually takes to  
implement it...


Another area of uncertainty: do we want html docs, or pdf docs, or both?  I  
always used html, but apparently most of the "new generation" of doc people  
prefer pdfs.  I heard a rumor that ghostscript takes a long time, so maybe  
html-only is the way to go.

Sadly, I think the only way to settle these questions is to produce a patch  
(picking whatever answers seem reasonable to you), wait for the complaints,  
and *then* have a serious discussion.  Otherwise we're stuck in the typical  
chicken-and-egg problem of lilypond development.